Ten Poems to Read When You Get Stuffed in a Locker

Because it’s so funny you forgot to laugh.

To those who have toured the inside of a gym locker, or eaten lunch in a locked bathroom stall. To those who can’t make the intramural team, or make small talk without flop sweat. Whether your days as a maladjusted sad-sack are blessedly over, or you’re still stumbling through them, take heart: these poems might cheer you up, or at least keep you company.

1. “I Am!” by John ClareJohn Clare was a malnourished, dirt-poor alcoholic, confined for decades to an insane asylum when they were still called insane asylums. Under this kind of duress, it’s extraordinary that he produced a poem of such vigor and clarity. It’s a veritable loser’s manifesto: “I am the self-consumer of my woes.” Or this: “And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed // Into the nothingness of scorn and noise.” And what about the heartbreak of “Even the dearest that I loved the best / Are strange—nay, stranger than the rest.”

2. “To Myself” by Franz WrightWright’s long acquaintance with addiction and despair is humbling. His poems often give voice to a spiritual abjection you’d presume would thwart the resources of language. His bared soul is a mess, but it’s alert and funny enough to follow self-pity to its absurd limits. In this poem, Wright escorts himself on a late-night bus trip. His self-consciousness is so acute, it claims the landscape (“I am the rain / and the others all / around you, / and the loneliness you love, / and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe”), then gently turns back to attend to its master (“and when you begin // to cough I won’t cover my face, / and if you vomit this time I will hold you: / everything’s going to be fine”). “I am going to buy you a sandwich,” it finally promises. Every time I read this last line, I snort and question its good taste. Then my eyes well up.

3. “[Speciously individual]” by Alan DuganNo alms for the alienated, no succor for the suckers. Don’t read Alan Dugan if you want to feel better about yourself. Think you’re so special? Maybe you’re actually just a gob of spit floating in the spit-bowl (“I dream of free bravery / but am a social being”). Read through this nihilistic assault to reach the gratifying pun: “I should do something / to get out of here / but float around in the culture / wondering what it will grow.”

4. “Larkinesque” by Michael RyanRyan, whose poems frequently revisit the tensions and cruelties of youth, here invokes the spirit of that crown prince of misanthropic, socially awkward poet-librarians, Philip Larkin. As his muse might have, Ryan reaches toward a cold-comforting thought: beautiful people are no better off for their beauty. “It’s only common sense that happiness / depends on some bearable deprivation / or defect,” the poet reasons through a sigh. How is this “common sense?” Because so many of us rely on it, I guess.

5. “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing” by W.B. Yeats“Be secret and take defeat,” Yeats advises. A far cry from the usual admonishments to Buck up, cowboy!, Yeats’s poem does not offer consolation after failure, but demands that the friend examine the worth of a suspect success (“For how can you compete, / Being honor bred, with one / Who were it proved he lies / Were neither shamed in his own / Nor in his neighbors’ eyes”). In other words, his friend’s peers aren’t fit to judge success or failure—so where’s the value in their appraisal?

6. “In Praise of Pain” by Heather McHughA tricky piece. The poem is studded with flaws, little signs of violence: breaks, cracks, chips, nicks, nips, pocks. They alter how the light strikes a surface, changing beauty or introducing it where there was none. Fluidly iambic lines (“A brilliance takes up residence in flaws”) punctuate passages of nervy, jerky syntax. The poem arrives at a surprising conclusion: “And break the bottle of the eye to see / what lights are spun of accident and glass.” The ultimate violence in the struggle to perceive beauty is to “break” the agent of perception (the eye) itself. When we “assault and drive and burn the devil” from something simply “perfect,” we’re rewarded with a heightened sense of the sublime. Imperfection: it’s radical!

7. From“Doctor Drink, #1” by J.V. CunninghamHere’s a poem with the bootstraps cure for dejection: a dubious affirmation of self-love. Cunningham’s speaker figures that any love outside the self can escape our control before escaping us altogether: what heart but the one you own will steadfastly follow your fickleness? Terse, smart, and sour, this is nevertheless one of Cunningham’s more poignant pieces. At first glance he comes off as a crusty old bird, but there’s a wealth of nimble wit in his brief poems. They’ll set up shop in your brain and provide hours of amusement on dateless Saturday nights.

8. “Dream Song 14” by John BerrymanEvery day as a college freshman, I had to cross the pedestrian bridge from which Berryman jumped to his death. Being a maudlin, deservedly friendless type, I turned this into a meditative ritual before I’d even bothered to read his work. After months of mispronouncing “ennui,” I found its flawless definition here in this poem, done up in the tetchy, long-winded rhetoric of an uneasy mind. It flings out and then gently swats down a swell of Romantic feeling (“After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn”). It confesses what all earnest, bookish sorts secretly think (“Peoples bore me, / literature bores me, especially great literature”). And it re-creates that nauseating reduction of space, matter, and time that attends a sudden attack of boredom (“and somehow a dog / has taken itself & its tail considerably away / into mountains or sea or sky, leaving / behind: me, wag.”). Bonus: it mocks those productive citizens who are fond of saying that only boring people get bored.

9. “I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t” by Richard BrautiganSometimes you’re the turd, sometimes you’re the lid. Sometimes you’re the sewing machine that sews the turd to the lid. If none of this makes sense to you, congratulations: you’re not much of a loser.

10. “Love (III)” by George HerbertFrom the ridiculous to the sublime, here’s an antidote to disappointment and feelings of deficiency, courtesy of George Herbert, a 17th-century parish priest and an astonishing poet. Love itself, in the form of a sensitive host, invites the speaker to sit at his table and partake. But the speaker’s too ashamed of his unworthiness to even look at Love. “Who made the eyes but I?” replies gracious, supernatural Love. The speaker relents and feasts.

COMMENTS (8)

I own a bunch to this poet who seemed to be writing about me about a hunded years before I came along. From him I learned to accept me and to take what I had and make something of myself.

So what if I am, as we say down South, "a mess?" We all can't be the most likely to succeed or the witiest or the most handsome.
Somebody has to be the old lump of coal. But..however..and so what..he doesn't have to stay that way..he can, and I think I did, become a diamond..of sorts. So I thank the man for making me see: "I am...the cowboy who "frit" the bird while scrambling "down to reach the misty dewberry." And I thank him for putting into words how a cowboy felt when he fell in love the first time. Often I re-read his "First Love" and I'm 13 again, "My face turned pale, a deadly pale," and "My heart has left its dwelling place And can return no more."

Thank you, mam, and thank you John Clare, from an old cowboy's heart

On September 9, 2007 at 2:32pm Rocky Georg Rutherford wrote:
Please correct my comments: I "owe" not "own." A "hundred" years not a "hunded."
Don't want folks thinking cowboys are illiterate.

Thank you,

Rocky

On October 18, 2008 at 10:43pm Jim Clayson wrote:
Whilst it is nice to see John Clare remembered, there has never been any suggestion that he was an alcoholic. (although plenty of his contemporaries were...)

But many of his Asylum poems are good and powerful. The trouble is, they are not too easy to get hold of outside the Oxford texts.

But at least we now have them as he wrote them (for the most part).

On August 30, 2009 at 12:26pm Virgil Clifton wrote:
Never have I felt a sadder moment;
Than the one I now live; Pause;
Never have I shared a misery; Pause; More than the one I fear, now; Pause;
Tomorrow is Monday!

On September 7, 2009 at 12:47pm EJ Mace wrote:
For many, home is the place we feel safe, connected. We are loved and welcome there. John Clare, while ill, walked 80 miles (or nearly 100, per some accounts) to get back to his home, which surely meant love to him.
This accomplishment alone merits him considerably more respect and kindness from you. And, well, the fact that he is the greatest English nature poet means we honor him and his remarkable achievement he made as he lived with illness.

On September 14, 2009 at 2:37pm Grave Grass wrote:

The note about John Clare is glib and rather repugnant. He wrote 'I Am' while he was committed to the Nothampton General Lunatic Asylum (no asylum in the UK was ever called an 'insane asylum'). There is no clear evidence as to why Clare was at first a voluntary patient in an asylum in Essex (1837-1841) and then, as it turned out, finally, committed to the asylum in Northampton, where he was paid for by a trust fund which enabled him to be a private patient (and so, very well attended to), from Dec. 1841 until his death in 1864. He was a drinker, but there is no evidence that he was an alcoholic. Life treated him fairly brutally, but to call him a 'loser' says more about the crass competitiveness of contemporary society (and poets) than it does about his delicate, hyper-sensitive, probably manic depressive, condition. Most people who visited Clare in either of the asylums did not understand why he was there at all. In all, across his entire writing life, Clare wrote some 3,500 poems, reams of prose and letters and natural history studies, and he continued writing till his death (though not much of the produce of his final years is extant). For more information, see www.johnclare.info PS - one of the contenders for the Booker Prize this year is a re-imagining of Clare's life in the Essex asylum, by Adam Foulds. Reviewed here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-quickening-maze-by-adam-foulds-1692331.html

On December 13, 2010 at 4:55pm Chris Sonzogni wrote:
What about "Dickhead" by Hoagland?

On February 19, 2012 at 4:47am Rafael wrote:
Yep Diane, it'll stay up iedtfininely, just stop pulling updates as we roll into May. And then in 2012, the whole thing starts again, and you can look back at 2011 (or 2010, or 2009) even then.

POST A COMMENT

Poetryfoundation.org welcomes comments that foster dialogue and cultivate an open community on the site. Comments on articles must be approved by the site moderators before they appear on the site. By submitting a comment, you give the Poetry Foundation the right to publish it. Please note: We require comments to include a name and e-mail address. Read more about our privacy policy.